New NFL-Betting App Uses AI to Even the Field

With the passing of Labor Day and the official start of the professional football season, sports analytics company Field Vision Sports is launching what it calls the first mobile app to provide artificial intelligence and machine-learning-based predictions of upcoming NFL games, giving bettors a leg-up in the multi-billion world of sports betting.

Founded by former NFL agent and Nike executive, CEO Scott Bouska, and Stanford PhD and former Instacart data scientist, Chief Data Officer Cameron Taylor, Field Vision uses a proprietary AI model to predict the best and worst matchups across the league on a week-to-week basis.

Field Vision’s model examines the past five years of NFL games and uses predictive analytics and football-specific context to produce more accurate predictions than other sources, which rely on historical averages, the company said.

"We've used machine learning models running off of years of play-by-play data to tell us how certain offensive players and teams perform and react to specific defensive variables, like coverage scheme, area of the field, route type and quality of personnel,” Bouska told AI Business. “Our models will quantify how players react to these variables, and whether or not that reaction is statistically significant over time, or just an specific outcome that doesn't repeat itself. The only things that make it into our model are based on statistically significant, repeatable interaction between variables." 

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Users get a variety of tips that can be used to place bets, predict player performance and deepen their game-day knowledge, the company said. As sports betting reaches all-time highs — Americans wagered a record $119.84 billion in 2023, a 27.5% year-over-year increase — the sportsbook percentage hold (the amount bettors lose) has increased every year since 2018, Field Vision said, citing the American Gaming Association.

As punters seek to even the odds, they are met with a deluge of statistics, which makes picking the right bets a challenge. Field Vision promises to cut through the information overload with a variety of matchup predictions for every game and every player, presented in a more manageable format.

Specifically, users get:

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The app also provides in-house content, such as a weekly blog and newsletter covering the platform’s current recommendations.

“Football fans' emotional and monetary investment in the sport is growing, whether they’re embracing the explosion in legalized betting, participating in fantasy leagues or more closely following the performance of their favorite players,” Bouska said in a statement. “But too often, they’re frantically scrolling multiple sites, sources or apps to find helpful, accurate insights. This is why we created Field Vision.” 

Looking ahead, Bouska said Field Vision could potentially expand into the NBA, but for now, the company is focused on football and the NFL. “We believe in going deep and building expertise in the sport vs other competitors that attempt to build models that work across sports.”

The app is available in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.